We spoke for two hours at the 53-year-old artist’s studio in the TriBeCa district of New York. A condensed and edited version of the conversation follows.

Q. Where did you grow up?

A. Here in New York. The Upper East Side. My mother is an urban archaeologist. My father — he died in 1992 — was a jazz musician.

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A Merger of Science and Art

A Merger of Science and Art

CreditAlexis Rockman and Salon 94/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

There couldn’t have been a lot of nature in your childhood.

Actually, there was a lot of nature, urban nature. Central Park isn’t natural, but to a child, it appeared to be. It has man-made ponds full of wildlife — sunfish, largemouth bass, frogs. There must have been five different turtle species in there.

Across the park was the American Museum of Natural History. I spent many hours there entranced by the dioramas of Akeley Hall. I was taken with how at the beginning of the last century, they’d used painting, lighting and taxidermy to create an immersive theatrical experience set in nature. Afterward, I’d go home and paint backgrounds on the tropical fish tanks my mother let me keep.

I wanted to be some kind of artist. As a kid, I was interested in science and science fiction, history, drawing, sketching. None of this came together in a defined way.

In the early 1980s, I enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design, thinking I might study film. After a year and a half, I took a break to figure out another path. Eventually, I enrolled at the School of Visual Arts here in Manhattan, with vague ambitions to learn scientific illustration. There I encountered a very kind teacher who suggested I consider fine art. For her class, she had me copy an 1853 painting by Gustav Courbet. That was so much fun! I was 22, and I had never made an oil painting before. I immediately switched majors and never looked back.

Once I was onto that path, I got excellent advice from someone who knew the art world. He asked, “What are you bringing that’s unique?”

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Alexis Rockman, in his Manhattan studio space, works with ideas like climate change and genetic engineering to create vast landscapes.

Credit
Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

I realized I had all these childhood interests in natural history. It struck me that if I took ideas from conceptual art and pop art and applied them to my childhood interests, I could create a hybrid language. To this day, that’s how I frame what I do. I’m a pop artist who uses natural history, and its history, as the basis of my work.

Your paintings are often rooted in scientific issues — climate change, extinction, invasive species. How do you go about researching your projects?

I start like a journalist. I ask questions, and I figure out what is the interesting thing going on. Then I find out who knows about it, and then I try to talk to them. Before I begin, I’ll go out to see things firsthand. I never start off with an idea of what I want it to look like.

For instance, right now, I’m working on a series of drawings about the natural history of life in New York City. This is for an exhibit that opens at Salon 94 on April 18. The show will be a kind of unofficial census of the city’s flora and fauna. For it, I went on a scouting trip to Coney Island Creek where there’s a wreck of a submarine and many abandoned cars. At low tide, you could see an amazing, almost postapocalyptic scene: dozens of wading birds — egrets, herons, ibises — looking for food among abandoned cars and shipwrecks.

On another day, Carl Mehling, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, gave me a tour of local places where fossils have been discovered. We went around to clay pits in Staten Island and the Palisades in New Jersey. I even found a marine fossil that I gave to my wife, Dorothy! That day, I collected 20 bags of soil and organic material from the different sites we’d visited.

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I’ll use it as pigment in drawings of creatures who once lived in those places. I first started doing that in 1994, when my friend Mark Dion and I took a trip to Guyana. We were traveling in the rain forest. He was collecting specimens, and I was making these meticulous drawings of insects. One day while in this really isolated place, my pencil disappeared! What to do now? I ended up grabbing a bunch of mud and used it to make art. I came back with a whole body of work made of Guyanese mud.

Is the natural world a reliable source for art supplies?

Not always. Once, I was making this series of pieces about the history of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. I asked the director of the museum there to send me a canister of tar. If I could make the tar fluid enough, I thought, I could use it draw the creatures of the Tar Pits.

Well, to do that, I had to find the right solvent. As I experimented, all I got was a congealed mess that ate the paper. Through a lot of trial and error, I discovered that benzene could thin the tar out to an appropriate consistency.

Do you take notes while doing your field research?

I do. I make little thumbnail diagrams with arrows and words. Later, in my studio, I look for pictures on how this subject been shown scientifically in the past. I’ll also talk to experts in a given scientific area.

In 1999, in starting this 24-foot-long painting for the 2004 reopening of the Brooklyn Museum, I took on the issue of climate change. The piece, “Manifest Destiny,” has since been bought by the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, where it currently hangs. The idea was to ask, “What will the Brooklyn waterfront look several centuries from now, after the glaciers have melted?”

So I asked myself: Who’s one of the most interesting people working on climate change? It’s James Hansen. I got an introduction and went up to his office near Columbia. I also talked to Cynthia Rosenzweig. She models the effects of climate change on cities. I constructed the painting by projecting some of what they told me could happen. Brooklyn is in ruins. The relics of humanity are on the bottom of the East River. The Brooklyn Bridge is rusted away. Afterward I thought, “I’m glad I won’t be around.”